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Adobe’s Photoshop CS6 is Free, for Now

By Roy Furchgott March 22, 2012 6:15 pmMarch 22, 2012 6:15 pm

As of today you can get about $700 worth of the latest Adobe Photoshop software free. But there is a catch.

Adobe is putting out Photoshop CS6 for beta testing. Anyone who signs on will get a full-featured version of the coming software to use (and help uncover glitches) as it is being refined for final release.

The catch is that when the final version comes out, the beta versions will not work anymore, and you will have to pay for the software that they hope you will find indispensible.

Why indispensible? By Adobe’s count, 62 percent of the features are new — that is, in addition to tweaks and enhancements of existing features.

Some of them are fiddly little things, and some are large, behind-the-scenes changes, like a new graphics engine that will make Photoshop run faster. A lot of the changes will matter most to professional users, but this is, after all, a professional’s program (the very capable Photoshop Elements, which has almost everything a hobbyist would need, can be found online for about $80).

There are a few new features that will make pro and amateur alike sit up and take notice.

Some of the more subtle additions are improved automatic adjustments. The system now compares your photo’s histogram to those of top shots from photography schools for more nuanced corrections.

There are also improvements to the astonishing Content Aware Fill, which lets you remove part of a photo – like a piece of trash on the lawn — and then automatically fills in the spot based on the background, in this case with more lawn. But sometimes the program searched too large an area for the fill, and it might fill in that patch of lawn with some sky instead. A new tool, called Content Aware Patch, lets you choose the part of the picture used for the fill-in, so the lawn stays lawn.

There is also a new tool called Content Aware Move, which — as its name implies — lets you grab part of a picture to move it, and automatically blends it in. So the two kids playing ball can be moved closer together with a few clicks of the mouse. The success rate is partly dependent on the background, though.

If you are fascinated by the new Lytro camera, which lets you shift the focus of a photo after you take it, there is Photoshop’s “Blur Gallery,” which lets you add blurring selectively to a photo. While there are tilt-shift filters and programs today that can add blurring, the Adobe version is much more adjustable. You can even have multiple focus points, meaning you can have people at different distances from the camera in focus.

On the more mundane but useful end, Photoshop will have automatic saving to keep you from losing work in a crash.

There are literally dozens more features worth looking at, and it won’t cost you anything to do so — at least for now.

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